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The pucks stop here: Six of them mounted on that playoff victory plaque in the Maple Leafs dressing room.

Not even halfway home for Toronto.

Just a relic now of another lost hockey season, a piece of wood, as flat and inert as the squad itself, in the aftermath of elimination.

Closer than last year but, really, insignificantly so. Not when assessing a team that had been assembled specifically, cunningly, for the post-season, with oodles of veteran leadership and all that jazz.

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Yet the road came to a familiar and abrupt end all the same last night, at 7:39 of overtime, a 3-2 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers, the Leafs another car wreck pushed off to the shoulder of the post-season, dusted in six games in the Eastern Conference semifinal.

Another group of players, with a different alchemy, might have been found in the dressing room afterward, still in their gear, unwilling to leave the scene.

Not this bunch. Quietly, in the inner recesses of their private sanctum, they changed and reappeared singly, those who reappeared at all, offering the familiar but banal cliches of defeat.

“It’s a pretty sickening feeling, “ said Brian Leetch, the trade deadline acquisition who seemed, at the time, such a crucial piece of the playoff puzzle, a steadying influence on the blue line; a guy, like several others on this recast team, with a Stanley Cup ring on his finger, the stuff of champions.

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But it was Leetch who was caught fatally up-ice on what turned into the winning goal the other way, a 2-on-1 break with only the snake-bit Bryan McCabe back.

McCabe did the reasonable thing, left the shooter to Eddie Belfour.

But the shooter in this instance was Jeremy Roenick and he was in his own groove on this night, deftly snapping the puck into the net, his second goal of the game.

“At the end, I kind of got caught looking at Mats’ rush, “ continued Leetch, referring to a magnificent effort by the captain, Sundin, on an offensive surge that came this close to deciding the result in Toronto’s favour.

“It came off a change. When I came off the bench, I was watching the rush instead of the guy behind me.”

In another corner of the dressing room, Alexander Mogilny was poignantly bemoaning an opportunity missed, perhaps even the last sniff at another championship the slick Russian will get, with labour woes casting a pall over the NHL, and his surgically mended hip maybe spelling imminent retirement.

“The older you get, the tougher it is to take, “ Mogilny said of losing. “There’s no tomorrow. You work all year and you end up with nothing.”

The defeat was still too fresh to analyze, elimination too raw. But Mogilny did offer a few notable observations about what had gone wrong in this game, a match in which Toronto had quickly fallen behind 2-0, only rallying late, and then squandering multiple chances to take the lead, both in the waning minutes of regulation time and the early minutes of OT.

“Maybe we pressed too much, were uptight in certain situations,” he said. “I thought we could have played a lot better.”

Sundin, who must be getting pretty sick of this, tied it up for Toronto with under five minutes to play in the third, pouncing on a loose puck in the slot, a goal-scorer’s goal. It felt then, belatedly, as if the Leafs had seized the momentum, had it within themselves to send this series back to Philadelphia. But it was not to be. The Leafs had rediscovered their mojo, but the Flyers had not entirely misplaced theirs.

“For some reason, we weren’t skating the way we had in the other games here.

“We snapped out of it, but . . . they were able to put the puck in the net when it mattered most.”

Toronto reawakened from its team-wide scoring catatonia at 9:04 of the third, with defenceman Karel Pilar launching the comeback when he drilled a slapshot from the point that grazed the post and caromed behind Robert Esche.

All felt possible, at that point, and the Leafs had the superior scoring chances in the remainder of regulation time, most especially when Tie Domi came up with the puck in front of what appeared to be a goner Esche. Domi will no doubt be reliving that moment for many sleepless nights to come.

“I don’t know how he stopped it, “ Domi said. “I thought I had him five-hole for sure.”

Then he added, surely speaking for them all: “It’s tough to swallow.”

So it ends, like it always does.

And, with the Air Canada Centre nearly emptied, a lone bagpiper played a mournful rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

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